The key information that can be derived from the term viral marketing is its relation to a virus. The similarities with real life viruses come from the fact that marketing information gets spread just like a virus from a person infected with the “virus” of commercial content who decides to spread it to the members of his or her social network. In this case, consumers willingly send the message to others, no matter if it is an e-mail, blog, video, advertisements, commercial newsletters, or web links to various marketing content.
Birth of a Virus
The origin of the term viral marketing is attributed to Jurvetson and Draper (1997), in an article taking Hotmail as an example. The authors used the term viral marketing to ...
Get Viral Marketing and Social Networks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
